Five Smooth Stones (43 page)

Benford watched him, seeing with the eyes of his memory the inside of a tiny shack in Georgia as it had looked years before; seeing his baby brother held close in their mother's arms, sobbing on her shoulder over some childhood's grief.

And he saw his father broken and weary beyond all complaining, looking down at the mother and son.

His own lips formed the words he had heard his father say then. "Lord Jesus, he'p him. He ain't nothin' but a chile."

CHAPTER 31

When David reached his room he shot the old-fashioned bolt on the door behind him. The campus, as he had crossed it, had been almost deserted. In a few minutes it would be full of students hurrying to lunch. He met no one in the outer or the main quadrangle except three freshmen, two girls and a boy, who looked at him with impersonal curiosity, no knowledge in their eyes that he was anything but another student loose before lunch for some reason. Evidently the rumor had not yet escaped from the confines of the sophomore class. One of the girls had a pink-and-white face and china-blue eyes. She was as blond as a Norse goddess is supposed to be, and David thought Wisconsin, and then found himself hating her, although he could not remember even speaking to her before, and only remembered seeing her from a distance. Then the hatred extended beyond her, became all-encompassing, took in every aspect of his life at Pengard for the past year and a half, concentrated on no one thing or person, but seemed to swirl around him until he was like a man in the eye of a tornado, in a still, small place made quiet and secure by invisible walls of deadly force and power.

When he was alone in his room, the door locked behind him, he felt that this was good: to hate with such intensity removed him from the hostile world to a place where nothing could hurt him, where nothing could reach him. He had been living in a foreign country, and now, at last, in the eye of his tornado, he was at home. He spent the day in his room, cutting classes. He tore up the letter to Gramp. He couldn't put his finger on any particular thing that Benford had said that had kept him from going to the rec hall and mailing it. All he knew was that something had changed and that he was going to play a waiting game. Time enough to write to Gramp when he was expelled. He ate cold luncheon meat, and crackers and cheese in his room, washed down with black coffee.

Peace, thought David. Peace, it's wonderful. It was a bitter peace, but a safe one.

He reached for his math notebook and flipped it open to the problem of that morning's class. He had made no effort to work the problem in class. He scanned it now, took a pencil from the beer mug on the card table, and resolved it quickly, easily. After that, still working in that eerie inner quietude, he organized his history notebook and started to make an outline from the paper Burbridge would expect at the end of the week. Three times, while he was working, there was a knock at the door; twice it was followed by a voice calling his name; the first time it had been Chuck's, the second time, Tom's. He did not know who had knocked the third time.

When he was two-thirds of the way through organizing his paper, he stopped, wondering at the exhaustion that swept over him, not recognizing it as delayed reaction. He found that he could not fight it, and stretched out on the couch.

Half an hour later he was still awake, wondering why he could not nap. How could he be so deadly tired, so sleepy, yet not sleep?—he who had always bragged that he could stretch out any time he wanted to and cork off for five, ten minutes, half an hour—and wake up wide-eyed and bushy-tailed.

He knew he shouldn't try to think the situation out now; that it needed perspective.
You got to take things like they come, son. There ain't nothing you can do about it.

Sweet Jesus! How did you go about proving a negative like this? Screw every chick on the campus and find out how fast lynch law could become civilized? Of all the accusations that could be brought, this was the one that could not be laughed off. He remembered the times he and Sudsy had locked the door of the room he lay in now, and he had labored until past midnight to pound Latin into Sudsy's head. "No, Stoopid! A deponent verb is
not
the same thing as a transitive verb. It just
acts
that way. Now,
look
—" If one of the knocks on the door that afternoon had been Sudsy's familiar rat-tatat, he would have opened the door, but that didn't mean—Who in hell? Who in the
hell
could have started that rumor? He thought of some of the students who had found it difficult to hide their dislike of matriculating with Negroes. There weren't many: a girl from Alabama, two boys from Georgia, a few others. There was a girl from Louisiana whose green eyes had always made him wonder how far back in her ancestry the dark woman was who had been impregnated by white lust. She made it a point never to walk alone with him across the campus or be seen alone with him talking, even in the rec hall. As a suspect she made sense, until he remembered someone saying she had gone home for Thanksgiving and had been operated on for acute appendicitis last Friday, must even now be convalescing in some mossy Louisiana town. This rumor had to have started sometime during the weekend.

He sat, finally, on the edge of the bed, swearing, elbows on knees, rubbing his head violently with strong, hard fingers. If he could not nap perhaps he could wake himself up enough to do some more studying. He did not hear the door open at the top of the little flight of stairs before he heard Chuck's voice.

"There's more'n one way to skin a cat, as my granmaw used to say, a puffin' on her ol' clay pipe."

David turned his head. Tom Evans, ahead of Chuck, was already on the lower step of the short flight, with Chuck looming behind him. Chuck looked at David and stopped with a suddenness that was almost recoil. Tom Evans did not look directly at David but walked without speaking to the chair behind the card table and sat down, picking up a ball point pen, twirling it in his square, small boy's hands.

"Look, David," he said in that surprisingly deep voice. "Look, you can't just hole up—" He let his eyes go to David's face, then stopped speaking.

David did not greet them or stand. "Which one of you guys," he said, "is chaperoning the other?"

"Stow it!" Chuck's exclamation was sharp, loud. He repeated it. "Stow it, David."

David did not answer, and Tom spoke again, inspecting the pen in his hands with the care of a foreman in a missile factory inspecting a crucial part. "Look, David, you can't just hole up. We were here earlier, separately. So was Travis, he says. Finally Chuck got the bright idea of trying the back way."

"If you were all that damned smart," said David, "you ought to be smart enough to figure out that if I'd wanted to answer the door I would have."

"Sorry," drawled Chuck. He walked toward the shelf that ran between washbasin and bookcase. "You-all got any coffee?"

"Plenty."

"Reckon it's all right if I make some for me and Tom?"

"Do anything you damned please."

"Only get the hell out and leave you alone?" Tom's eyes were extraordinarily adult in the childlike face. "Right," said David.

Tom did not move. The flame of the Sterno was sputtering beneath the pan. Chuck was standing over it, watching it as intently as though it were a laboratory experiment. David watched him and smiled suddenly, but it was not a smile either of his companions would have recognized.

"You're both having a tough time, aren't you?" he said. ' "I'll give you a hand. Everything's just fine. For the first time since I came here I know where I stand. Right where I belong—in my place. It's going to be a hell of a lot easier from now on. One hell of a lot easier. You guys stay out of my backyard and I'll stay out of yours, and nobody'll get hurt."

Tom slapped the pen on the table and started to speak, but Chuck was ahead of him. "Yeah," said Chuck. "That's what I thought you'd say. You think I grew up in Georgia for nothing?"

He stirred coffee in two mugs, handed one to Tom, said, "You're welcome to some of your own coffee, young Champlin. I'll fix it in your toothbrush glass. Mugs are for company."

David stood for the first time since they had entered. "Look," he said. "Look, you guys. Get lost, huh?"

"How you talk," said Chuck.

"I'm not going to get lost," said Tom. "I'm lost already. A little lost sheep, that's me. Chuck now, he's not as lost as I am because I guess he's more conditioned to it." Suddenly Tom exploded verbally, and the unexpected spate of invective penetrated even the quiet spot in the center of the tornado where David was dwelling. David looked at him with awe. The words, coming from a youth who would not have looked out of place playing sand lot baseball with a bunch of eighth-graders, had a breathtaking impact. Bull Evans's son knew his way around in Anglo-Saxon. When he had finished, David could not hold back the comment: "Congratulations."

"Yeah," said Tom. "Sure. Congratulations. I've heard my old man, when I was a kid, tell strikers about scabs and finks."

"And what, if I may be so bold, did he say to the scabs and finks?" asked Chuck. "If I'm not too young to hear."

"He didn't say anything to them. He just smiled. Like a wolf smiling at a lamb. He used to tell me he didn't want to catch me swearing unless I meant it; he said otherwise it was just obscene."

"My old man—and a fine old southern fanner he is, and meaner than they usually come—cusses the way he breathes, natural like, all the time," said Chuck.

"Look, David." Tom pointed the pen at him. "Now, look. I've been listening and watching my old man trying to fight discrimination all my life. So far he's lost, as far as the unions are concerned. And that's one hell of a note."

Chuck said: "Prejudice is the same difference, anywhere you find it. It doesn't have to be a rope or a fire or a knife. You want us to get lost, David. We're not going to get lost. Maybe we shouldn't have come here. Maybe we should have gone about our business first."

Something in his tone brought a sharp question from David. "What business?"

"They aren't going to get away with it. That's what he means," said Tom.

"Who's 'they'?" snapped David. "Who in hell knows who 'they' is—are. Just drop it. Drop it right now." He walked past the table where Tom was sitting to the window beside the fireplace, stood looking out, his back to the room.

"David," said Chuck, "I couldn't drop it. I humbly suggest that you come down out of that ivory tower and give us a hand. Of course there's no law says you have to. You can just shack up here in your li'l ol' room with your li'l ol' fireplace and hire you a li'l ol' freshman to bring you your meals, and you don't even have to speak to li' ol' us again. And all through the cold winter nights you can sit in front of your li'l ol' fireplace and think of us out there fighting your big ol' battle for you."

David heard a sharply indrawn breath, and knew it was Tom's, and that Tom was afraid Chuck had gone too far. He had, thought David, too damned far. He felt his hands ball into fists in his pockets, felt anger crawling up his belly, fought it, waiting for the calm he knew would follow. From the window he saw a world grown dark enough to bring out the pale lights in the main quadrangle. He felt a lifetime older than the two boys in the room with him. When, for Christ sake, had the whites fought the Negroes' battle on any front except argument and words? He turned back to the room with an abrupt laugh.

"All right, John Brown," he said. "All right. And when your academic body lies a-moldering in the grave I'll put flowers on it every Grand Army day. And I'll tell my little black pickaninny grandchildren what a good fight you put up. For the last time—Chuck—Tom—will you drop it? Drop the whole Goddamned stinking mess!"

"No," said Tom. "We won't drop it, David. You can do whatever you want, and if it's nothing, then do that. But we aren't going to drop it. We sort of hoped you'd give us a hand, help us find a starting point, but if you won't, we'll have to find it ourselves."

"There isn't a starting point. That's what I'm trying to tell you guys; there isn't a starting point. Not one you'll ever find. A thing like this is like some—some self-generating poison gas."

"I know that," said Chuck. "I know that too damned well. You can't ever track down where the rumor came from that starts a lynch mob gathering." He stopped, ran a hand through the tow-colored stubble that was his hair, finally spoke hesitantly, almost appealingly, ignoring Tom, looking directly at David. "You'd understand, David, you'd recognize the words, if I said 'A man's got to trust someone.' " His eyes met and held David's, and the somber fire in David's seemed to die out a little, and he dropped his eyes first and turned away.

Tom had taken the pen apart and reassembled it. He held it up and looked at it closely, one eye squinting. "Maybe so there isn't any starting point," he said. "But I've got a nasty, dirty little suspicion running around in my mind. Have to do some research before I say anything. You had supper?"

"I've got enough here. I'm stuffed now."

"We thought we'd get some ribs." There was still hope in Tom's voice, but when his eyes met only the impassive darkness of David's face he joined Chuck at the door. "See you in class tomorrow?"

"How the hell do I know? Maybe they expel you in the middle of the night here, give you an hour to leave town. If I'm not there, it's been nice knowing you."

David saw Tom's face flush with anger, and looked away.

"O.K.," said Tom. "O.K., dad, if that's the way you warn it."

Chuck's hand was inside Tom's coat collar. "Come on, young Evans, come on."

"Wait," said David slowly. "I'm—I don't want you to think I'm not grateful. I guess I was rude. Anyhow, thanks."

"That's all right," said Tom. "But you sure as hell can make me see red. Be seeing you—"

***

David looked at the clock on his desk—a few minutes past six. He could call New Orleans collect and it wouldn't cost much. Calling every so often made Li'l Joe happy, and also took the pressure off him to write his weekly letter. When he heard Gramp's voice accepting the charges, he could always hear the undertone of happiness. He wanted to hear Gramp's voice now and called himself a damned baby for it. But he hesitated; there had never been any way to keep anything from Gramp for long. No matter how hard he might try to keep his voice normal, he knew how the conversation would go: "What's worrying you, son?... Nothing, Gramp, nothing. Just thought I'd call.... You lying, son.... No, Gramp.... Yes, you are. You feeling all right?"